Lorenzo Veneziano was the leading Venetian painter of the second half of the 14th century. Major state commissions (which a generation earlier had gone to Paolo Veneziano) eluded Lorenzo — the contract for the Paradiso (1368; Venice, Doge’s Pal.) going to the Paduan Guariento — but his influence on later Venetian painting was profound and widespread.

Lorenzo seems to have worked extensively outside Venice, and he introduced to its art elements drawn from a wider experience of mainland Italian painting and Gothic art in general. The traditional view that he was trained in the studio of Paolo Veneziano is supported neither by documents nor by any certain corpus of early works.

His earliest surviving signed work is the Annunciation with Saints and Prophets (1357; Venice, Accademia), known as the Lion Polyptych, from S Antonio Abate, Venice; its full-length saints share the elongated proportions of Paolo’s figures but differ in the urbanity of expression in the faces, and the draperies already show a version of Gothic style typical of Lorenzo.

In 1356 he signed a panel (untraced), formerly in Verona. A fresco of the Madonna of Humility with Saints (transferred to canvas; Verona, S Anastasia) and a Crucifix (now Verona, S Zeno Maggiore; the presence of a Dominican donor, however, suggests that it was probably also from S Anastasia) may be Lorenzo’s earliest works (both c. 1356–7). The former has donors from the della Scala family, probably Cangrande II and his wife. Frescoes of the Adoration of the Magi and the Coronation of the Virgin (both Verona, S Fermo Maggiore) have also been attributed to Lorenzo (Cuppini, 1961). None of these works is particularly reminiscent of Paolo.